National Forum on Ethics and Archiving the Web, Day 1

The dramatic rise in the public’s use of the web and social media to document events presents tremendous opportunities to transform the practice of social memory.

Web archives can serve as witness to crimes, corruption, and abuse; they are powerful advocacy tools; they support community memory around moments of political change, cultural expression, or tragedy. At the same time, they can cause harm and facilitate surveillance and oppression.

As new kinds of archives emerge, there is a pressing need for dialogue about the ethical risks and opportunities that they present to both those documenting and those documented. This conversation becomes particularly important as new tools, such as Rhizome’s Webrecorder software, are developed to meet the changing needs of the web archiving field.

The National Forum on Ethics and Archiving the Web will bring together activists, librarians, journalists, archivists, scholars, developers, and designers to talk about how to create richer, non-oppressive web archives—archives that will better serve their publics and the historical record.

The first two days of the conference will comprise keynote presentations and panel discussions on topics such as archiving human rights abuses and the right to be forgotten. The third day will feature workshops and unconference sessions. A three-day conference pass is $90 ($75 for Members). Individual session tickets may be purchased for $15 ($10 for Members) via the conference website. New Museum and Rhizome Members can email curatorial@rhizome.org to receive an access code for discounted Member tickets.